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This afternoon included a wonderful flight with a guy from France who is working on his CFII-H (helicopter instrument instructor rating). First I would like to thank our government for driving down the value of the dollar to the point that East Coast Aero Club’s prices on the R44 are less than half what flight schools in Europe are charging. Second, I would like to thank Air Traffic Control for some entertainment during today’s flight. Boston Approach called a Cessna and asked “Are you familiar with Boston Class Bravo Airspace?” The pilot responded “Ummm, I think so.” The controller then noted “Well, you’re in it without a clearance. Suggest descending below 3000′.” [Class B airspace protects arrivals and departures at the nation’s busiest airports. Violating Class B airspace is a serious offense, but not likely to be pursued by the FAA in this case because the Cessna pilot was well clear of the airliners.]

My French student was a bit jet-lagged and “behind the aircraft” as they say in the world of fast airplanes. He failed to make a 90-degree turn on a GPS approach and Hanscom Tower called us just as I was asking roughly what heading we would expect to fly when on a Runway 23 approach. Instead of saying “Do you idiots realize that you’re heading for Logan Airport instead of Hanscom?”, the tower controller asked “N171WT… are you inbound to the airport at this time?” (an unusual call to an aircraft that has been cleared for an approach and accepted that clearance). I replied that we were learning how to find the airport.

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As the war in Afghanistan settles into its eighth year, it might be worth asking ourselves how the Taliban and Al-Qaeda can possibly remain so strong. Who has been financing these guys for eight years? What if the answer is “us”?

Let’s consider a homeowner in Kabul. Prior to the U.S. invasion, he might have been able to rent out his house for $250 per month. Whatever his political or religious beliefs, he would not have been able to support any cause because he would need all $250 to feed his family. After the U.S. invasion, dozens of U.S., U.N, and NGO groups moved into Kabul, driving up the market rent to over $1,000 per month (due to overwhelming demand, Kabul is now one of the most expensive cities in the world; see this U.N. report showing that the cost of living in Kabul was higher than in New York City in 2005). Our homeowner now has a $750 per month windfall. What will he spend it on? Depending on his feeling about the U.S. occupation, he may well choose to spend some of that to pay the salary of a Taliban fighter.

The U.S. military buys food and supplies in various local markets in Afghanistan. It pays vastly higher prices for these items than it would pay at a Walmart in Kansas. Some of the higher cost translates into profits for Afghans who sympathize or are connected with the Taliban. When the U.S. trucks in supplies, it pays the Taliban directly not to attack the trucks (source). When a fraction of these supplies go missing from U.S. bases, they are sold by Afghans (source), who may turn over a percentage of their profits to fighters against the U.S.

Let’s consider an aid project in a village. We’ve heard that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world (source) and that at least 50 percent of the money that we’re putting in gets siphoned off by various politicians and their cronies (though perhaps not as much as Wall Street, GM, and Chrysler siphoned from U.S. taxpayers!). If half of those siphoned funds end up in the Taliban’s pockets, that’s enough to support a large army.

Given the high cost of supporting a U.S. soldier in the field, the low cost of paying an Afghan fighter, and the level of corruption and anti-U.S. feeling in Afghanistan, it would not be surprising to learn that every soldier we put into Afghanistan supports ten Kalashnikov-toting Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.

Assuming that we cannot win a decisive victory when outnumbered by 10:1, this is a simple recipe for an endless self-sustaining war.

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As you type an instant message, send an email, or have a spirited phone call, have you ever wondered whether the U.S. Government is listening in? And, if so, would they understand that you weren’t serious when you said that you wished some politician would die before he or she could raise taxes again?

Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, has done more to assuage Americans’ fears about government surveillance than any official ever could.

The guy exchanged email with Anwar al-Awlak, an outspoken advocate of jihad who moved from suburban Virginia to his ancestral home of Yemen (source).

The guy posted pro-suicide bombing arguments to Islamic Web sites using his own name, “Nidal Hasan” (source).

The guy stood up in front of a group of U.S. Army officers and said that “non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.” (source; original slides)

Was this guy arrested? Harassed by federal agents? No. In fact, despite poor job performance, he was promoted to Major in the U.S. Army! Instead of summonses to tedious court proceedings, the government sent him paychecks.

The bad news is that the same government that determined Dr. Hasan was a prime candidate for military promotion is trying to teach America’s children math and English as well as run most of our health care system. The good news is that it would appear our free speech rights are stronger than we imagined.

[Separately, as noted in this Telegraph article, the incident with Dr. Hasan calls into question the efficacy of psychiatry:

Selena Coppa, an activist for Iraq Veterans Against the War, said: “This man was a psychiatrist and was working with other psychiatrists every day and they failed to notice how deeply disturbed someone right in their midst was.”

The American Psychiatric Association says that it is “science-based”. If the discipline demonstrably lacks predictive power, is it fair to say that it is somehow scientific? (I am not saying that I agree with Ms. Coppa’s assertion that Dr. Hasan was “deeply disturbed”, only that if expert psychiatrists could not predict that Dr. Hasan was likely to act on his stated beliefs, it would be nice to know what psychiatry can predict.)]

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Almost a year ago, I wondered if extending unemployment benefits made sense. This month Congress was at it again, taxing the working to pay the non-working and borrowing from America’s children to pay the currently middle-aged (H.R. 3548). I had dinner Friday night with a very capable 40-something woman. She stayed home with her three children until 2006, then found an entry-level job at an architecture firm. Due to her intelligence and energy, she was quickly given additional responsibilities. However, she found herself laid off in the fall 2008 economic collapse. What has she been doing for the past 12 months? “I go to a Web site every week and answer five yes/no questions by clicking the mouse,” she answered. “They don’t ask me if I’ve actually looked for a job, just if I’ve been available for full-time work. Then they send me a check.”

How do her unemployment checks compare to her former earnings? “I had downtown parking fees deducted from my payroll checks, plus a bunch of other stuff. The difference in take-home pay is only about $100 per month. Because I get health insurance through my husband’s employer, I have no financial incentive to look for a job.”

Related: My July 2008 review of The Forgotten Man, a history of the Great Depression that shows that “virtually every action by Hoover, Roosevelt (FDR), and Congress hindered the U.S. economy”.

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An 82-year-old friend recently woke up with a slight fever. Living right next to some of America’s best hospitals, he decided not to take any chances with his health and went down to Massachusetts General Hospital (“the massive genital” as my MD friends call it). As an American citizen on Medicare’s fee-for-service system, he was a prime candidate for a battery of expensive tests. They decided to start with a CT scan, enhanced with a dye. The test did not reveal any pathology, but it did provoke a near-fatal allergic reaction that resulted in him being hospitalized. He was fortunate to escape the fate of the 1 in 75,000 patients who receive this test and die (source). Having gone over to Mass General with a slight flu, my friend emerged after 12 days hovering on the edge between life and death. The taxpayer was stuck with a bill of at least $20,000 for an illness that was entirely caused by the test.

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Most of the news from Washington should be scary to investors. The federal government is expanding at about the same pace that it did during World War II and running huge deficits. Nobody has a credible story for how the debts being accumulated now are going to be repaid. Ridiculous promises are being made to public employee unions, pensioners, Social Security recipients, Medicare patients and providers, and, through health care reform, everyone else in the U.S. Yet the stock market is climbing. How is this possible? Let’s consider one result of the government promising things that it has no way to pay for: some percentage of people won’t believe the promise.

Looking at the numbers for Medicare and Social Security, for example, a citizen might believe that the age of eligibility for both programs will be increased and benefits reduced. He or she would act on that belief by saving more money now against the day when Congress reneges on all of the current promises. Where can he put those savings and get some protection against inflation, the collapse of the dollar against foreign currencies, as well as the promise of a bit of a return? The stock market. The more recklessly the U.S. government behaves, the more comforting will be an ownership stake in a multinational company such as Intel or GE.

This is a reformulation of the standard observation that people in countries with untrustworthy economies and/or governments tend to save more.

[Of course, I recognize that perceived recklessness by the U.S. government may have some negative consequences for the market as well, but this posting is to point out one positive factor. A reckless U.S. government would provide an even bigger boost to foreign stocks and bonds, which I believe have also been doing quite well lately.]

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An airline pilot friend sent me a song: “Tweetin’ on a Jet Plane”.

This may not be an accurate summary of the recent airline flight that failed to respond to ATC and overshot Minneapolis. Northwest Airlines does not offer in-flight Internet access on their Airbus A320s (source). Thus if the pilots were indeed working on their laptops it would have to have been using a desktop application such as Microsoft Office. Various politicians are calling for banning electronic devices in the cockpit, on the theory that every safety problem can be fixed with an additional regulation. I have personally observed airline captains using smartphones while parked on a taxiway waiting out air traffic control/weather delays. They did this to check weather, contact Dispatch, and do other flight-related tasks. A ban on the use of such devices would have simply inconvenienced passengers further and would not have improved safety (we were stopped with the parking brake set, an all too common situation at JFK). Once in the air, cell phones tend not to work, especially T-Mobile (I have tried it from helicopters and light airplanes, while someone else was on the controls).

No politician seems to be willing to consider the idea that the two pilots simply fell asleep, something that has happened numerous times before to airline crews, and then made up a story that they thought would sound better. In a jet one usually has to respond to a radio call at least every 5 or 10 minutes, if only to switch from one controller to another (each controller handles a specific block of airspace and at 500 miles per hour one tends to go through those blocks pretty quickly). It would be very strange for an awake pilot, even one distracted by a computer, not to notice the lack of radio exchange.

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President Obama expressed confusion as to why Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed a group of American soldiers. Perhaps that is because he was reading the same New York Times article that I was. An imam is quoted as saying that Dr. Hasan “wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab, and maybe the women he met were not complying with those things”. The same article quotes Nader Hasan, a cousin, saying that unhappiness about a potential deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan motivated Dr. Hasan’s violence. This struck me as odd. If Dr. Hasan wanted to meet pious Muslim women, wouldn’t an all-expenses paid trip to a country containing millions of such women be something for him to look forward to? Surely it is easier to find a hijab-wearing woman in Afghanistan than in Texas.

[August 2024 update: That last sentence probably isn’t true anymore…]

What’s it like over there for a medical doctor? One of my friends, a man in his 60s who went to Iraq with his reserve unit, sent me his war diary from 2005. Here are some excerpts (I’ve changed the names):

• [at a training and embarkation base in the U.S.] Now it is back on the bus for a trip to medical screening, finance paperwork, a meeting with Joe Smith (medical liaison employee) whose job it is to take care of the doctors. … it comes as no surprise that he is of little or no value. Add to that the fact that he doesn’t know this and he has all of the makings of a first rate government employee. One would think that with 131 groups before us, Joe would have the program down pat, have detailed handouts and guidance for everything from what to wear to where to play golf, but he doesn’t.
• [Next day] we are off to the dental clinic. My unit failed to send my dental records so I must repeat the bite wing and Panorex films even though I have a copy of my current physical showing the dental visit. The procedures require much waiting time for very little clinical time.
• [afternoon] we head for the CIF. This is the clothing issue point. The stations are numbered. Go from 1 to 19 and you get most of the things that you need and lots of things that you don’t need. I ask why I need snow boots and a shovel in the desert. Answer: because it is required. I now have three green duffel bags filled with stuff. There are uniforms, boots, body armor vest, flight suits, gas mask and best of all, a 9mm Beretta pistol. Since not everyone goes to Iraq, (some to Afghanistan, Kuwait, etc) it makes sense to issue thousands of dollars of unusable or unneeded equipment to everyone. They were all out of the body armor plates that go in the vest.
• [next day] What could be more fun than a 2 hour classroom lecture on how to shoot a pistol followed by a 45-minute bus ride to the range? The sun is bright and the air temp is 93 degrees. The first group of 15 soldiers goes to the line, performs their tasks (shooting computer controlled silhouette targets), and steps away for the second group. I join the second group since it is clear that it is only getting hotter and we must wear the armor until we finish qualifying. I ask for a civilian instructor to help me since I have little experience at the range. He does a great job for me; does everything but pull the trigger and I am an expert marksman. I even shoot, by accident, the distant target of the 2nd LT next to me.
• [next day] Starts at 7 AM for Death by PowerPoint presentation, a series of legal, cultural and ecumenical lectures designed to put the most alert person to sleep.
• [next day] Another beautiful day and this time it is a 4-hour course on map reading. With plotter and protractor we perform the basic functions that we teach our student pilots to do in about 20 minutes.
• [weekend] I sort out my three duffel bags of military equipment. It appears that two of them can stay behind in a rental locker that Dr Jones has hired for 4 months. I’ll pay my share so that I don’t have to schlep all of this to the desert.
• [next day] About 50 of us will take the 4-hour course on improvised explosive devices. We learn that a lot of the Iraqi bombs are made from US artillery shells. The plastic explosives are all from France. I ask the sergeant how it is possible that we are being attacked with our own friendly ordinance. I’ll let you know when I get an answer. The films are very interesting. The terrorists video most of their attacks to use as advertising. They also compensate their members based on the damage they wreak.
• [next day] Convoy class. The PowerPoint lectures are given by reservists on one year of active duty. They have never been to Iraq. Most of the slides are from the internet; few are from the Army. The take home message is that 50 percent of the deaths occur to truck passengers, either alone or in convoy.
• [about a week is spent playing golf, riding horses, and otherwise killing time waiting for a plane to the Gulf] Time is being wasted at the usual military rate.
• [after getting off the plane] We are in Kuwait. Considered by many to be a battle zone, at least for tax purposes, we are shuttled from here to there in buses protected by trucks with 50 caliber machine guns. Our first stop is RFI. This is a clothing issue point where we receive a mandatory allotment of “must have” gear for the war. I get knee pads, elbow pads, a new Kevlar helmet. Was there something wrong with the one that I got 2 weeks ago? I also get socks, tee shirts, Oakley sunglasses (you know the desert UV) and some other valuable stuff. This brings the price to $1,200. I sign for the goods. Amex is not needed because the Feds trust me not to lose the equipment. The clock keeps ticking, none of us sleeps. In fact, there is no place to sleep. We see a video tape from the Commanding General reiterating the rules of war. It includes commentary on drinking, drugs, sex and shooting the enemy. I don’t forget that we never shoot people; only “threats” or enemies.
• [on the ride from Kuwait to Iraq] The C-17 aircraft is a story by itself. What a beautiful $200 million machine. Great glass cockpit, FMS and highly capable autopilot. Holds 240,000 lbs of fuel and grosses at 560K. The amazing part is that it can get in and out of 3,000 feet. Every landing is power-on and the underside of the flaps is titanium allowing them to act as thrust diverters for landing. This is a great family aircraft because you can put your boat, SUV and a couple of hundred close friends and head to [a tiny airport in Maine] if the fuel burn doesn’t scare you.
• We get to [Iraq destination] in an hour and then hold near the airport for one hour while a mortar attack occurs. Watching the fireball explosions from 15,000 feet is enough to unnerve any clear headed person. Cleared to land we taxi in. I thank the crew profusely for their kindness to me and we make our way by bus to the passenger terminal. We finally get checked in as soldiers in Iraq. We do a little paperwork, dine at the Burger King at the PX and I get a room at the DVQ. Distinguished Visitor Quarters are for O-6 and above. A trailer with 2 bedrooms separated by a bathroom. I couldn’t be happier. I sleep on my down pillow until 8:30 AM.
• [next day] After lunch and a quick PX visit to buy soap we walk to the Air Force Hospital. It is a true combat support hospital. Air conditioned tents, all surgical specialties, trauma and ICU doctors. The Blackhawk lands on the pad. A bloody Iraqi is being bagged, then wheeled immediately to the ER. One of his legs is missing. The staff and their morale couldn’t be better.
• [afternoon] Bill [comrade from Guard unit] makes it back from his meeting. It is a warm reunion. He and his family are doing well. We have dinner and catch up on events past. One of the members of the unit has recently committed suicide. There was little warning. Apparently his wife was also in the Guard and was outside of his door when it occurred. Live ammunition, even in the hands of people unencumbered by mind altering substances, is always a risky procedure. This has not been the first suicide and certainly won’t be the last. Bill told me about the two Chinook helicopters that were totaled. One was destroyed in a whiteout sandstorm leading to a hard landing; no one was injured. The other was fuel management by pilot error. They switched tanks and flamed out both engines at 500 feet and 140 knots. The landing was very hard. The aircraft was crunched and there were three serious pilot injuries.
• [flight to field hospital] One of the boys drives me back to the flight line at 9 PM for the 10 PM departure in a Chinook that leaves at 10:40 PM. We fly at 500 feet AGL [above ground level]. The lights are out and I spend some time in the cockpit. I sit behind the left hand forward 50 cal machine gunner. They wear night vision goggles and would probably shoot anything that moves. There is a right hand forward gunner and another at the tail. Since I don’t consider the guns to be deterrents to ground fire, I can’t wait to get to [the destination]. About 40 minutes does the trick. We land, luggage is removed and we are greeted by the outgoing doctors. They are already at the airport for their flight that will leave in 2 hours.
• [next day] [Doctor soon to be rotating out] takes us on a giant walking tour of the Camp. We see everything including the mess hall, PX (new and quite nice), the gym, the administration building, the laundry, etc. I get 45 rounds of 9mm ammunition which I don’t need for two reasons. One, my magazines are lost in the other duffel bag [lost by charter carrier from U.S. to Kuwait]. Two, one bullet is sufficient if you need to use this gun. At any rate, I comply with the rules and put the stuff in my bureau drawer. At 6:30 PM I see two patients at sick call. The first is a 23 year old with severe low back pain, probably a slight disc herniation although there are no neurological sequellae. He is very nice and appreciative. I treat him conservatively with non steroidals and bed rest. The second is a 30 year old woman who arrives with her sergeant complaining of a right breast lump for three days. I do a thorough history and exam and find rib tenderness below the left and right breasts. On further questioning, she has just done a maximum amount of pushups for her PT test. There are no lumps. The sergeant insists that I order a mammogram. I explain that there is no need. She is adamant. I suggest that when she takes the patient home that she do the breast exam and bring her back if she finds a lump. If I needed a mammogram, I would have to fly the patient to Germany. I give her some non steroidals and wave adios.
• [next day] I awake to a beautiful sunrise. The air is clear and the crescent moon has disappeared. 7 AM is the perfect time to shower. I shave in the

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A reader pointed me to a September 30, 2009 Forbes magazine article, “Cambridge runs amok”. In this article, we learn the following:

• the city manager earns $300,000 per year (plus benefits and pension obligations that may cost another nearly $300,000 per year)
• the Cambridge, MA’s director of affordable housing gets paid more than the governor of Massachusetts
• the city has accumulated $1.2 billion in liabilities, most of it from unfunded pension liabilities, which would grow far larger if doctors are clever enough to extend peoples’ lives

The liabilities, divided by the 22,000 parcels of taxable land in Cambridge, work out to roughly $55,000 per property owner. A different way to put this into perspective, considering the valuable commercial office towers in Kendall Square, is to look at the total value of property in Cambridge. According to a September 21 letter from that $300,000 per year city manager, the total tax base is about $24.3B, making the liabilities about 5 percent of property owners’ assets. So it is still safe to buy that $1 million condo in Harvard Square, but remember that you’ll eventually have to pay $50,000 of that in taxes, in addition to whatever it costs to operate the city government on a current basis.

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Now that Google’s Android operating system is appearing on a bunch of new smart phones, it seems like a good time to report on my year with Android on an HTC/T-Mobile G1 phone.

How has it worked as a phone? Call quality and reliability are as good as can be expected on the T-Mobile network. In other words, it works great if you stand on one foot in space L17 in the parking lot of the Swedish Physicians office across the street from T-Mobile’s Bellevue, Washington headquarters. The phone has survived a few drops onto concrete and asphalt surfaces. About 5 percent of the time that the phone rings when in my pocket, I manage to hit the “hang up” button while pulling it out; I wish that it were a flip-phone design. Dialing via voice recognition works remarkably well considering that my phone is hunting through a list of several hundred contacts.

The slide-out keyboard is nice, but the “carpal tunnel hump” on the right side should be patented by hand surgeons. Will the next dictator of the world please require mobile phone QWERTY keyboards to be freely accessible from both sides?

Using Android means using Google Web applications. As of late 2008, syncing with Microsoft Outlook did not work well even as a one-time transfer, much less as a day-to-day operation. If you’re wedded to Outlook, stick with a Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone. I was already a user of Gmail and Google Docs, so moving to Android meant mostly adopting the Google contact manager. Contacts is the weakest part of Gmail and especially a year ago, could best be considered a work in progress. Importing contacts from Outlook, Google’s software would drop much of the information on the floor. Microsoft’s programmers envisioned a world in which some phone numbers are associated only with a company. The Smartest Programmers in the World (TM) wrote software in which such a contact was imported as just a phone number with no association to any text string, person’s name, or company name. Repeating the import command resulted in a complete set of duplicate contacts. Via this blog posting, I am hereby offering to purchase a Windows 7 machine for the Gmail group and a copy of Microsoft Outlook so that they can see what the average user might need. One wishes that someone at Google had spent a few hours watching a Microsoft Outlook user and writing down those features that were most critical.

Speaking of Outlook, the To-do Lists and Notes features are missing from the Google world and/or buried so deep as to be useless.

What works well? The native Gmail client is excellent and Google Calendar is mirrored painlessly. Google search and Web browsing work well and are fast on the 3G network.

I have just begun to experiment with Google Voice, which offers some very nice features, especially the ability to use one phone number for home, work, and cell (could save huge $$ for someone who travels internationally; calls will forward seamlessly to an Android phone with a local SIM card; voicemail messages will be transcribed and attached as an audio clip to email rather than retrieved at $3 per minute). An Android user can download an application that sends the central Google Voice phone number as the caller ID so that call recipients don’t get confused about who is calling. This important feature is unavailable to iPhone users who labor in shackles on Steve Jobs’s plantation.

For a completely Googlified Lifestyle (TM), the most glaring omission is Google Docs. I don’t necessarily want to edit Google Documents from the phone, but I store many snippets of critical information in various Google Docs. It would be nice to have an application that took a search string and made it easy to scroll through fragments of documents and spreadsheets that contain that string, pulling out the complete document for review only as a last resort.

As far as style goes, most of the people I’ve met using iPhones were overweight middle-aged men. Most of the G1 users that I’ve met were attractive slender women between the ages of 20 and 40.

The year-old G1 is somewhat underpowered for the latest Android release. One of the drawbacks of a phone running a normal multi-tasking operating system is that a background process may be consuming 100 percent of the CPU, memory, and network. It is common for an application to freeze, not because the code is buggy but because the phone is devoting its resources to a background process.

What’s missing? A dock so that I can use my Android as a home computer, as described in “Mobile Phone as Home Computer”. An Android device offers voice and text communications, Web browser, music, photos, and video. If I learn to use the Android interface, why should I have to learn anything else? Just give me a big screen, normal keyboard, and fast processor.

More challenging would be to rethink the user interface to a task/user orientation. A traveler with a mobile phone ought to be able to say “show me nearby hotels with vacancies, their room rates, and a button that I can press to reserve a room”. This would have been possible in the 1990s, even before phones had built-in GPS receivers. The carrier knows approximately where the customer is. Expedia knows where the vacant hotel rooms are and the rates. The hotel industry pays commissions to anyone in the booking chain. You’d think that you would be able to do that on any phone with more than 5 lines of screen space.

Current smart phones, especially the iPhone but including the Android, put themselves first instead of the user first. The phone is proud of its abilities to display movie showtimes, so the user looking for an evening of entertainment is expected to hunt among the applications and select the “MovieTime” app. A user-oriented interface would try to capture some information about the user. Is the phone user at home, work, or traveling? Is the phone user working, trying to connect with friends and family, or looking for some kind of diversion?

Suppose that the phone has figured out that the owner is on his way home from work and is trying to figure out what he wants to do for the evening. Instead of giving the owner a choice of 100 applications from which to choose, the phone would gather the most relevant information about entertainment options, nearby friends and family who are also planning to go out, nearby restaurants, etc. and present that information in a compact format. Despite all of the virtues of a SmartPhone, the lack of a full-size keyboard and mouse makes it slower to interact with than a PC. The phone should anticipate more of what the owner is likely to want to see and bubble it up to higher level pages.

Summary: If your life revolves around Microsoft Outlook, a Windows Mobile phone will be a better choice or possibly a Blackberry. If your life revolves around Google Web applications, the Android OS is probably the best phone on the market. In the abstract, how does Android compare to the iPhone? Text-oriented users will appreciate the fact that several Android models have full QWERTY keyboards. Voice-oriented users will appreciate the fact that all Android models to date have superior call reliability and sound quality to the iPhone. Both iPhone and Android suffer from the “let’s lump all applications into a big array and let the owner click down into one after another to accomplish a task.” A Macintosh computer owner who uses a lot of desktop applications will probably prefer the iPhone; a Web-oriented computer user or Google Voice enthusiast will probably prefer Android.

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